1st Edition
Kandinsky’s Abstract Orientalism Colonial Contexts and Early Abstraction
By Emily Christensen
Copyright 2027
200 Pages
20 Color & 34 B/W Illustrations
by
Routledge
200 Pages
20 Color & 34 B/W Illustrations
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This book examines, for the first time, Wassily Kandinsky’s turn to "the Orient" in his early abstraction. Reframing him within colonial history, it reveals how his artistic innovations were shaped by Orientalist tropes, transforming our understanding of this modernist artist and his work from 1909 to 1913.
For over a century, scholars and curators have celebrated Kandinsky as a pioneer of... Read more
1. Kandinsky and Orientalism: A Historiography 2. Japanese Art, “Abstraction,” and the East/West Binary 3. Persian Painting and the Formation of a New Strategy for Abstraction 4. The Colonial Context of Kandinsky’s Tunisian Journey 5. Gabriele Munter’s Photographs of Tunisia and Artistic Agency 6. Kandinsky’s Iconographies of Orientalism 7. Abstract‑Orientalist Paintings Within a Colonialist Society
Biography
Emily Christensen is an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, UK.
